The Rose Garden

by Susanna Kearsley

  I’d never been down here. I stood a moment on the slipping pebbles and breathed in the sharp, wet, salty scents of sea and stone, and found I liked the feeling of the wind-flung mist against my face. There was no ship in sight today, but I could very easily imagine one – the Sally, maybe – sliding darkly past the Cripplehorn and coming in to anchor while her men cast off the smaller boat to bring her smuggled goods to shore. I raised a hand to shield my eyes and squinted at the vision while I tried to make my mind up who to give her as a captain, Jack or Daniel … who would be the taller figure moving in among the others on the deck, a silhouette against the sails …

  ‘So,’ said Felicity, as she came crunching up behind me, ‘where’s this cave?’

  Mark pointed. ‘There.’

  In front of us the waterfall that tumbled down the Cripplehorn and hit the beach below in an uneven, narrow spray was flowing fast and full today, the streams that fed it swelled by all the recent rain. At times in summer it was no more than a trickle, but today it was impressive, as though it had somehow known there would be someone to show off for.

  Susan, who’d taken her time down the cliff path, caught up to the rest of us now and moved past, looking hard at the waterfall, then at her brother. ‘Why didn’t you show me this ages ago?’

  He gave her the same answer he’d given me, sort of – that she’d been too young when he’d played here, and when she’d been old enough he’d left off playing in caves. He seemed game to recapture the fun of it now, though. It was hard to keep up with him, dodging the worst of the wet of the waterfall, balancing carefully on the slick rocks. I looked down for a moment, unsure of my footing, and when I looked up Mark had vanished.

  I stopped in my tracks in surprise. ‘Mark?’

  His voice seemed to come from the solid rock. ‘Here.’

  Then I moved to the left, and I saw it. The cleft in the rock was concealed by the fact that the opening faced the sea, sideways, so when it was viewed from the front all that showed was the unbroken rock of the cliff. And from the sea no one would notice it either, because of the cascading screen of the waterfall.

  Mark waited till he was sure I had seen him before he moved forward and into the cave, and I followed. The sudden close of darkness was unsettling, but as my eyes adjusted to it I could see that it was not complete. Faint shafts of filtered light from somewhere overhead showed me the inward curving walls, the deeply worn and pitted floor that, while it lay above the tide’s reach, was still flecked with shallow pools of moisture everywhere; the remnants of a row of barrels, little more than bits of wood and badly rusted metal now, that had been left to moulder in the shadows.

  More unsettling than the darkness was the sudden change in sound, as though I’d cupped a hollow shell against my ear and shut out everything except the rushing echo of the sea and the more stealthy and insistent dripping of dark water into unseen pools within the cave.

  And then Felicity came in and broke the silence with a voice that echoed, too. ‘This is incredible.’

  Behind me, Susan asked her brother, ‘Did you bring a torch?’

  ‘Don’t need a torch,’ he said. ‘It spoils the effect.’

  I knew what he meant. Any light, let alone the hard beam from a flashlight, would ruin the secretive feel of the cave. I could see the appeal this would have to a boy playing pirates.

  Could see, too, why the Butlers would have chosen it to hold the goods they smuggled in from Brittany aboard the Sally. They’d have likely dropped her anchor round the headland at high tide, and under cover of the darkness rowed the contraband to shore. It would have taken several men to do the work, and I remembered how the book I’d read at Oliver’s had said it was a point of pride that no one in Polgelly had betrayed this cave’s existence to the constable.

  When he had searched the house that day, the day he’d found me there alone, the thing that he’d been looking for had probably been hidden safe down here.

  I wondered what it was.

  Behind me, Susan moved towards the row of barrels. ‘Look at these. Your Butler brothers left these, I expect.’

  Mark didn’t think it likely. ‘They’re not old enough. Besides, they weren’t all empty when I played here. I’ll lay odds that was Dad’s private stash of whisky.’

  ‘I’m surprised he let you play here,’ Susan said.

  ‘He didn’t know. He would have had my hide if he’d found out.’ Mark took an idle step away, and accidentally his foot kicked something out of place that scuttled with a rasp across the stone. He bent to pick it up.

  I asked, ‘What is it?’

  ‘Just a bit of strapping from a barrel, I’d imagine.’ He tossed it back into a corner. ‘Not like the treasures we used to find.’

  Felicity set down the spent candles. ‘What sort of treasures would those be, then?’

  ‘Lots of things. Musket balls, sometimes. Old coins. I’ve got some of them still, in a drawer somewhere.’

  Susan, who had still not quite forgiven him for keeping the cave secret from her, said to him accusingly, ‘I’ve never seen those, either.’

  ‘Yes, well, pirates hide their treasure. They don’t show it to their sisters, do they?’

  ‘If they want to go on having meals cooked for them,’ Susan said, ‘they do.’

  Mark’s smile in that dim light was hard to see, but I could tell he knew, as I did, that when Susan set her mind to something she would not be swayed. ‘I’ll try to dig it up,’ he promised, then he paused as a faint rumble filled the cavern.

  Felicity, hearing it too, announced, ‘Thunder.’

  ‘So it is,’ said Mark. ‘We should start back, those rocks aren’t so easy to climb in the rain.’

  I hung back a bit and took one final look over my shoulder as though by force of will alone I could push through the barriers of time and see the cave as Daniel would have known it. But I only saw the darkness and the dripping stone and hollow walls that told me I had come too late. Three hundred years too late.

  Outside, Mark’s voice called, ‘Eva?’

  I turned again and stepped out of the silence through the cleft beneath the waterfall, and heard the singing of the sea.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Back at the house, Susan gave Mark no rest till he’d gone up to look in his room for the childhood treasures he’d claimed he still kept ‘in a drawer somewhere’. In spite of his earlier vagueness, he must have known exactly where they were because it wasn’t long before he came back down and set a slightly grimy biscuit tin between us at the kitchen table.

  ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘My plunder.’

  Susan gave it an experimental shake. ‘What’s in it?’

  ‘Have a look and see.’

  He put the kettle on to make the tea and watched with patience while we sorted through his ‘treasures’: small bits of polished glass and stone, a limpet shell, a tarnished metal button, the cork from a wine bottle, two shilling coins and a ha’penny, some woman’s earring with worn plastic pearls, the promised musket balls, and underneath all that a length of rusted metal so misshapen that it wasn’t recognisable as anything. Until Felicity reached out to pick it up and gently brushed the flakes away.

  I stared, then, as the cold chased up my spine.

  Susan asked her friend, ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Some kind of knife.’

  She looked to Mark, who shrugged and said, ‘I think I found it in behind the barrels. Don’t remember.’

  It was in fact a dagger, small and neatly made to fit the hand that held it so precisely that whoever faced it in a fight would only see the blade. I knew, because I’d seen it twice myself already.

  Susan touched it lightly. ‘What’s the handle made of?’

  Felicity peered at it. ‘Bone, I think.’

  Not bone, I could have corrected her. Shell. Some sort of shell like abalone that could show its colours in the light. But it was mostly gone and what remained was crusted thick with dirt, and there would be no way I
could explain how I had known. Instead I asked her, ‘May I hold it?’

  It felt strange in my grasp, cold and rough, not the smooth deadly thing it had seemed when I’d seen it in Daniel’s hand just a few days ago. Just a few days … Had it been only that? It seemed an age, and I wondered again at how quickly he’d come to be someone I missed, when he wasn’t there.

  Susan said, ‘It looks so old.’

  And Felicity, watching me, had an idea. ‘Eva, why don’t you take that and show it to Oliver? He knows a lot about weapons and things. He could tell you how old it is. And what it’s worth, even.’

  Mark didn’t think it would be worth much. ‘Not in that state.’

  But Felicity told him, ‘You never know. The strangest things can fetch the highest prices, sometimes.’

  My fingers closed protectively around the rusted knife. ‘You wouldn’t sell it?’

  ‘That?’ Mark looked as though the very thought were ludicrous. ‘Of course not.’

  Susan smoothly interjected, ‘And you don’t mind if Eva takes it down to Oliver?’

  ‘If that’s what she wants to do.’ It was a bit of a challenge, but I wasn’t paying attention, not really. My own thoughts were concentrated on the unaccustomed weight of Daniel’s dagger in my hand, and I was trying to remember if I’d ever seen him when he wasn’t wearing it.

  Except for that one time when I’d surprised him late at night in bed, I didn’t think I had. For all I knew he’d had it with him then, as well – it seemed to be his favoured weapon, and the one he reached for first when he was faced with any threat.

  What threat had Daniel faced down in that cave, I wondered, that had made him draw his dagger? And why had he lost it?

  Of the older stones still standing in the overgrown churchyard most had been so worn by weather and by time that it was difficult to read the date or name, and of the names I could read none was ‘Butler’.

  The Halletts were all here – Mark’s father and grandfather and his great-grandfather and varied cousins and other relations, since this little church of St Petroc’s had stood its whole life within view of Trelowarth and served all the families who’d lived there by turns.

  It was really no more than a chapel of ancient stone set by the side of the road that ran up from Polgelly, wound past the back of Trelowarth and on to St Non’s and beyond that to Fowey.

  The tale went that back in the dark, misty times lost to memory a raiding ship from Ireland had wrecked upon the coast, and the sea and the black rocks had taken the lives of the people aboard her and spared only one man who, wanting to show thanks to God, had built with his own hands this little church upon the hill. It made a rousing legend, but there was no way of knowing what was true, or if he’d ever found his way back home to Ireland, or if in fact he ever had existed.

  Time was good at erasing the tangible proof that a person had lived.

  Behind me the gate to the churchyard creaked open and clanged like the chime of a clock. ‘Morning,’ said a man’s voice and, turning to answer, I saw the church sexton approaching with his wooden-handled garden shears in hand. I remembered those shears, and remembered the sexton who, though he’d grown greyer, still walked with the stride of a working man. And he seemed to remember me, too, though his memory had likely been helped by the fact that my coming to stay at Trelowarth would have been a subject much talked about down in the pubs in Polgelly.

  ‘Now Miss Ward, see, I thought it was you.’ The broad smile, with its row of impossibly even teeth, took me right back again.

  Feeling about five years old, I smiled back. ‘Mr Teague.’

  ‘You’re a little bit bigger than my memory of you, I’ll admit, but then it’s been … what? Twelve years?’

  ‘More like twenty.’

  ‘Never.’ He pretended shock. ‘You’ll have me feeling ancient, so you will.’

  I didn’t think it likely, and I said as much. ‘You look the same.’

  ‘You’ll want to have a doctor test your eyes, my dear.’ But he was pleased. And then he said, as though it needed saying, ‘I was sorry when I heard about your sister. Never seems right when the young ones go. I’m told you brought her back with you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good for you. The dead deserve to have a peaceful place to rest. She wouldn’t find that in America,’ he said with the certainty of someone who’d never set foot out of Cornwall himself, looking round at the shaded green churchyard with its leaning rows of grey stones. The vicars of St Petroc’s came and went, but Mr Teague had been a fixture of this churchyard for as long as I’d been coming here – it had seemed to me that every time I’d chanced to pass this way he’d been here somewhere, with his crowbar or his mower or his old wood-handled shears, and he had always taken time to stop his work and chat a minute.

  It occurred to me that Mr Teague might be the one to ask about the Butlers, so I did. He turned the surname over in his mind, and frowned a little.

  ‘Butler. Seems to me as there might be a grave or two of that name.’

  ‘I didn’t see any.’

  ‘Well, you wouldn’t now, not if they’re old as you say. Let me just fetch the book from the vestry.’ Setting his shears down beside the church’s side porch, he took out his great jangly key ring and opened the old arched oak door with its black iron hinges. I could have gone in with him, but I preferred to wait out in the fresh morning air with the songs of the birds spilling out from the trees and the warmth of the sun on my back. In a minute or two he returned with a small book with plain cardboard covers, the kind of book that local history societies everywhere tended to publish.

  Mr Teague turned the pages with work-calloused fingers, in search of the one that he wanted. ‘In 1822,’ he said, ‘there was a survey done of where the graves were to that time, and the inscriptions that were readable were copied down. Ah, yes, Butler. There be two graves here, for Butlers. In the south-west corner. Come, I’ll show you where they’re to.’

  The churchyard’s south-west corner was the closest to the road, and Mr Teague had waged a battle here against the hawthorn hedge that had been planted at its edge along the bank. The hawthorn hedge was fighting back. It had begun to creep across the top of the flat stones set horizontal in the earth. The stones themselves, already partly hidden beneath moss and waving grass, were both so beaten and eroded by the weather I could scarcely make out any traces anywhere of letters, much less read what had been written there. But luckily, in 1822, the words had still been legible.

  ‘Says here that one,’ Mr Teague said, pointing, ‘is Ann Butler, died 20 October 1711, at the age of 23. “Beloved wife”, it says. And this must be her husband.’

  He moved on. I held my breath for one long heartbeat without meaning to.

  ‘Jack Butler,’ Mr Teague read from the book. The stone had split across the centre, as though something had been dropped on it. ‘No dates on this one, strangely. Just an epigraph: “My God will raise me up, I trust.”’

  I breathed again. Jack Butler would have died an older man, I knew, because he’d lived to see his journals published nearly a quarter of a century after the time when I’d met him. And the quote from the poem by Sir Walter Raleigh, an earlier seafaring rogue, seemed quite fitting for Jack.

  I asked, ‘So there are no other Butlers here?’

  Mr Teague read down the list of inscriptions again. ‘Not here, no. That’s the lot. Were they relatives, then?’

  ‘No, I’m doing some research for Susan’s new venture.’ I knew he’d have heard about that. ‘You know, finding out who used to live at Trelowarth.’

  ‘Well, here’s the lad coming now that you ought to be asking about things like that.’ Mr Teague gave a nod to the road where a cyclist was just coming round the sharp bend at the top of The Hill from Polgelly. I recognised Oliver straight away, even with his cycling helmet on.

  ‘That is,’ said Mr Teague, ‘if you’ve not already been asking him.’

  I caught a sly tone in his voice th
at made me wonder just what else was being talked around the village pubs, these days.

  It hardly helped that Oliver, when he caught sight of us beside the hedge, slid to a stop beside the road and smiled a brilliant welcome. ‘Morning, Eva. Mr Teague.’

  The hard climb up The Hill had left him faintly winded, and his T-shirt clung with perspiration to his chest and shoulders while the muscles of his legs beneath the biking shorts were perfectly defined.

  ‘Oliver.’ With one more knowing nod in my direction Mr Teague said, ‘Well, I’ll let you two young people talk. I’ve got my work to do.’

  I said, ‘Thanks for your help.’

  ‘It weren’t much.’

  As he started to go, I remembered to ask, ‘Mr Teague, could you tell me the date of Ann Butler’s death one more time, please?’

  His weathered fingers flipped the pages of the book again to find it – October 20, 1711 – and I thanked him for a second time and, as he headed back across the churchyard to the place he’d left his garden shears, I turned instead to Oliver. ‘Do you have a pen?’

  He found that amusing. ‘Do I look like I have a pen?’

  I glanced once again at his close-fitting T-shirt and biking shorts, and said, ‘No problem,’ repeating the date in my memory a few times to hold it there.

  Oliver asked, ‘Who’s Ann Butler?’

  ‘Daniel Butler’s wife.’

  ‘You’ve found out more about them, then, your Butler brothers.’

  ‘Just a bit. That’s Jack,’ I said, and pointed to the broken stone. ‘The younger brother.’

  ‘So where’s Daniel?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I wasn’t sure exactly how I felt about not finding him. There might be peace, I thought, in knowing how he’d died, and when, and yet a part of me was happiest not knowing.

  Oliver felt confident that he could track the information down, in time. ‘I like a challenge.’

  ‘So I see.’ I nodded at the bike. ‘You do this sort of thing for fun, then, do you?’